A Burning Question: Can Long-term Data Inform Fire Management in the Twenty-first Century? - Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Change - page 69

(a)

(c)

(b)

(d)

Figure 4.6 Patch mosaic burning. (a) Small areas of land are burned in different years, creating mosaic
of habitats that have different post-fire ages (shown as different shades). This can benefit biodiversity by
creating a range of early and late succession habitats as well as retaining fire refugia (Parr and Andersen
2006). Reproduced with permission from John Wiley & Sons. (b) Seasonal mosaic burn in Mali, showing
an early-season burn in the mid-ground, untouched vegetation in the background, and a later-season
burn in the foreground (Laris 2002). (c) Early-season burns create a fragmented fire scar. Late-season
burns in this landscape will also be fragmented, because the fuel base is broken up. (d) More extensive
fire scars result from late season burns alone (Laris 2002).

burning had taken place, fires later on in the season were also more fragmented (Fig-
ure 4.6c, d). Similarly, in the Central African Republic, Bucini and Lambin (2002) found that
anthropogenic fires, started early in the dry season, created and maintained vegetation het-
erogeneity and prevented the more damaging fires that would otherwise occur later in the
season, and which were more common in areas far from human settlement (Bucini and Lam-
bin 2002). Archibald et al. (2008) found less fire in more densely settled areas, due to the
effects of fire management on fuel connectivity.
Similar fire management patterns have been practised in Australia and are still maintained
in some areas. Fire in Australia began about 15 million years ago with the drying out of the con-
tinent and the onset of the Australian monsoon. Regular storms and associated fires created a
strong selection pressure for plants like eucalyptus that have fire adaptation traits (Bowman
et al. 2003). In turn, animal communities developed that could exploit different post-fire ages,
and thus fire became a major driver of both plant and animal ecology. Human arrival in Aus-
tralia about 70,000 years ago is associated with the extinction of megaherbivores and the